BY
LOUIS GOLDING
1921
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
NEW YORK
FOR MY FATHER
A Glossary of some Yiddish words is given on p. 308.
CONTENTS
BOOK I
FORWARD FROM DOOMINGTON WALLS
CHAPTER
BOOK II
FORWARD FROM PHYLACTERIES
BOOK III
APHRODITE
BOOK I
FORWARD FROM DOOMINGTON WALLS
Russia—here was the first Babylon. Sitting onthe metal stool, his second-hand velvet suitfraying against the heat of the oven, Philip's big eyeswere round with horror of this immense, inscrutableplace. Everything they said was portentous, notwholly real. Many of their words attained a meaningonly after laborious thinking.
"Kossacken—big as trees!"
"Big spikes in front of the Gubernator's house!Babies stuck! Rachel, the parchment-maker's daughter,caught up on a white horse! Never heard of again!"
"Blood in the streets, thick!"
A fear and a helpless rage seized the faces there,always only half seen in the gloom of the kitchen. Byday, beyond the bars which uselessly scowled againstthe small glass panes, the drab walls of the house nextdoor kept away everything but a dirty and dubiouslight. By night, the flare of the coal-gas jet distortedhis father, Reb Monash, and his own feet on the fender,and the sofa into things of blurred, awkward lines.
It must be confessed that Reb Monash Massel wasnot wholly unconscious of his power to produce thisatmosphere where terrible and impalpable presencesflowed from his lips in a shadowy rout. Sabres flashing!Hilarious ponderous blasphemies tangled in the beardsof Kossacken storming onward and away!
"You've heard me talk of Mendel, the Red One?No, not the shoemaker, the clerk! It was whena clerk he was, in the woods! They were cuttingthe Posne firs. They knew he was a Jew, thewood-cutters, and they put their heads together.Can one be a Jew without stabbing the goyishke eyes,eh? He was working very late one night; it was nearthe end of the month and he had all his accounts to makeup. Well, he was bending over his papers very busy,and it was late, after midnight. There were owlshooting and two or three mad dogs in the woods cryingnow and again. It was very miserable, but he was bentover his figures. Ab